For the event, I baked up a few batches of Moroccan fekkas and coconut ghoribas, which turned out to be a pretty polarizing choice of desserts. People either really liked the biscotti-like, anise-spiked fekkas, or the fluffy, semolina-battered, lime-zested and icing sugar-dusted ghoribas.

Personally, I adored the fekkas. They hold up great for weeks in an air-tight container, and are perfect with green tea in the afternoons or at night.

Absolutely exhausted from a long week of baking at Dépanneur le Pick Up. Starting Monday I’m going to start posting way more about my new job there as their baker! The amount I’ve learned in the last month alone kind of blows my mind. It’s hard to think of myself as a ‘professional baker,’ but I like it. The hard work and immediate results are instantly satisfying in a way that writing has never been for me. This week alone I’ve made a chocolate devil’s food cake with caramel granache, vegan cranberry jam bars, spiced pumpkin cake with cinnamon cream cheese frosting, pumpkin butterscotch cookies, dark chocolate brownies, lemon bars, moist apple cake, tiny currant tea cookies, and sweet/salty Smarties cookies (the Canadian version of M&Ms)! (I tend to Tweet quite a bit about my baking adventures).

So you’ll excuse if I’m exhausted this evening — there’s no recipe to celebrate tonight. Just an image of the most humble kind of meal: a dish of pasta, extra spicy Italian sausage, and sauteed beet greens. Dep baking posts to start with vigor next week; in the meantime, check out the first event I’ve booked at the Dep — a film screening with brilliant filmmaker and friend Hisham Mayet, who is the co-founder of the amazing record label, Sublime Frequencies. More here.

Earlier this summer, I was doing research for a piece on Singaporean music for Signal to Noise. My friend Hisham Mayet of Sublime Frequencies recommended that I get in touch with Los Angeles ex-pat, writer, and music archivist William Gibson (no, not thatWilliam Gibson), who released the compilation Singapore A-Go-Goon Sublime late last year.

We hung out in Singapore and he took me record shopping around Chinatown. After I returned to Oregon, he emailed me a bunch of scans of 45″s from his personal collection. Aren’t they incredible?? I love everything about them — the candy colors, explosion of fonts, the demure, pretty girls + faux-gruff men in silk neckties.